


The Embrace of the Sea

by Kainosite



Category: Les Travailleurs de la mer | Toilers of the Sea - Victor Hugo
Genre: Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-12-25
Packaged: 2021-02-26 22:28:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 7,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21842131
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kainosite/pseuds/Kainosite
Summary: Gilliatt meets the pieuvre in his first visit to the flooded cavern, and their lives take a different course.
Relationships: Gilliatt/The Pieuvre
Comments: 7
Kudos: 11
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	1. From the Fall Springs the Ascent

**Author's Note:**

  * For [iberiandoctor (Jehane)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jehane/gifts).



Gilliatt tumbled first into light, and then into fire.

He was surrounded by a cold so intense it felt like his flesh was being seared from the bone. He gasped in shock and sucked in a great gulp of air. He looked down at his hands and found them bathed in a turquoise radiance, a light like the inside of a glacier, a light that was burning. He felt himself sinking into this caustic light and tried to push it away, and he bobbed back to the surface.

Understanding dawned on him. 

He had fallen into a pool of water, and into deadly peril.

He had been searching the reef for debris from the shipwreck, and had decided to explore a fissure in the granite. This passage narrowed like a throat. It had swallowed him. He found himself beset on all sides by rock. It scraped at his arms, barked his shins, grazed his forehead. In places he had to wriggle sideways or drop to his knees and crawl. But ahead of him there was a dim radiance; this tortuous passage had an outlet. Gilliatt arrived at it. He wrenched his shoulders through a tight gap, stumbled forward under the force of his momentum, and took a step – into empty air.

The fissure opened onto a flooded cavern. Beneath a sheltering dome of granite lay a subterranean pool, a well that sank to unfathomable green depths. Far underwater, an arched tunnel opened onto the sea: it was through this porch that the sun’s rays, filtered by two fathoms of sea water, penetrated the hidden chamber. This was the source of the phosphorescent blue glow that suffused the water, the radiance Gilliatt had seen around his fingers which in that first instant of shock he had believed to be burning him.

The light was harmless, but the water was lethal. It was a mild, sunny day, but it was March; at this time of year the water of the Channel is at its coldest. Furthermore, the tide had just turned. Colder water from the eastern side of the Channel was beginning to rush around the Cape de la Hague, between Guernsey and Jersey, and onto the Douvres. This current is a hazard to sailors, but death to swimmers. The sea outside the cavern could not have been more than nine or ten degrees. In the subterranean sanctum, where the emerald pool was shielded from the warming rays of the sun by ten thousand tons of granite, the water was even colder.

Water of fifteen degrees is cold enough to kill. If Gilliatt could not escape the pool within minutes, he would be lost.

Nevertheless, he had some advantages. The great hazard to the sailor or the victim of shipwreck unlucky enough to fall into the winter sea is not the cold itself, but the chance that in that first moment of shock and that great involuntary gasp, he will inhale water. People drown before they can freeze. In wrenching himself free of the crevice Gilliatt had given himself enough momentum to turn almost a full somersault, and he landed on his back. His first gasp drew in air, and then he instinctively began treading water.

In contrast to the breakers crashing roughly against the reef outside, the surface of the hidden pool was perfectly tranquil. The water lapped at the walls of the cavern with a gentle rhythm, translating the violence of the waves into a motion as calm and regular as breathing. In this still pool, Gilliatt had no difficultly keeping his mouth above the surface even in his initial bewilderment.

Then, too, he had been immersed in the frigid sea for weeks, slipping in and out of the water like an otter as he went from rock to rock in the course of his salvage operation. Never had he experienced a dunking like this one; he tried to avoid going in further than his waist, and he never got his hair wet. Still, he was accustomed to being wet and cold. His body had become hardened to it. Such exposure cannot prevent the initial shock, but it greatly speeds the recovery.

Within thirty seconds Gilliatt had regained control of his breathing and his senses and begun to look around his prison.

The wall behind him was an overhang. The sheer rock rose at an oblique angle to a small ledge two meters overhead, above which he could see the narrow black fissure through which he had entered. This cliff was covered everywhere with damp moss and slimy confervae, all slick and wetted by the receding tide. There was nothing on which to take hold. It would be impossible to climb.

There were no other openings in the upper walls of the chamber. At the far end of the cavern there was a square outcropping of stone that rose above the surface of the pool, low enough that Gilliatt might be able to pull himself up onto it and out of the water, but the very accessibility of this altar rendered it useless to him. The waves were already washing over its edges. Soon it would be completely submerged.

A man can survive immersion in such frigid water for several hours, but he cannot swim or tread water for more than ten minutes. After that his extremities will grow numb, paralysis will take hold, and he will drown. In a few hours the rising tide would lift Gilliatt back up to the level of the ledge he had entered by, but it would raise a corpse.

His only hope was to swim for the underwater entrance.

There was nothing to be gained by delay. With every passing second, his limbs were growing colder and slower. He took a deep breath, kicked off the rock wall behind him, and dove.

This decisiveness and swiftness of action was one of Gilliatt’s outstanding qualities. Without it, he would not have come to the Douvres at all. A man who hesitated, who carefully reflected before taking action, who assiduously weighed up the risks and obstacles, would never have dared to imagine that this solitary salvage operation was possible. There are sometimes great victories to be won by leaping before we look.

But this tendency did prevent Gilliatt from seeing what else was in the water.

The underwater porch was two fathoms below him. He swam towards it with powerful sweeps of his arms, propelling himself almost a meter with every stroke. From the inside of the cavern it was impossible to determine the length of the tunnel, but he was nearing the arched entrance and he still had plenty of air; he felt confident that he could make it through the passage without difficulty.

Just as he reached it, he felt something catch around his ankle.

Gilliatt kicked his foot, thinking it was one of the long strands of kelp that grew from the walls of the pool. But instead of coming loose, the thing that had entangled him tightened further. He turned in the water, intending to pull it off by hand, and found that he had been captured not by an encumbrance, but by an intelligence. The tendril that gripped his ankle had seven companions, and at their center, at the hub of the wheel of which they formed the spokes, a pair of eyes were staring back at him.

He had encountered the pieuvre.

To recognize the creature was to imagine horrors. Would it anchor itself to the floor of the tunnel and trap him there until he drowned? Would it constrict him with its many arms until it had squeezed all the air and life out of him? Worst of all, would it fasten its suckers onto him and drink him alive, a vampire mated with a vacuum?

Even as these thoughts were flooding through his brain, the pieuvre pulled itself up his body, clambering over him and enveloping him in its deadly embrace. Tentacles wrapped around his torso, entangled his arms, ensnared his legs. The creature began to squeeze, a relentless pressure.

What was he to do? He was unarmed. He had brought along his hammer and his chisel to aid in his salvage operation, but he had taken neither with him in his exploration of the fissure. He needed his hands free to crawl and pull himself through the narrow gaps, and it was clear that even if he found some useable wreckage, he would never be able maneuver it back through the crevice. If he found a useful piece of flotsam his plan had always been to go around the reef and retrieve it from the other side.

He could not pull the pieuvre off with his bare hands. Its velvety flesh was covered with a coating of slime, and in the water it was impossible to get a firm grip. Besides, he could not seize it with both hands for any length of time, for whenever he stopped swimming to grapple with it, he began to sink. If he once let it come within reach of the bottom, it would latch on to the rocks with its suckers and hold him below the water until he drowned.

In his struggle, he had drifted close to the wall of the cavern. As he swept his arm through the water to keep himself afloat, his fingertips brushed the rough stone. He did not want to allow the pieuvre a mooring-place. It seemed to him this could only work to its advantage; if it was able to attach itself to the wall, perhaps it could creep down it arm over arm until it pulled him under. He reached out to push himself back into open water, and as he did, his outstretched hand struck against something smooth.

It was a shell.

The walls of the cave were lined with shells of all kinds, which had grown to enormous size in this protected sanctuary. The pieuvre had little interest in them: it was a gourmet, and deigned to eat shellfish only in extremis. It preferred a diet of crab. Untroubled by their distant cousin, they spent their days nibbling on the abundant beds of moss and the algae that grew on the rocks, and building up their shells into ever more impressive whorls and ornaments. The marine Gastropoda were arrayed here all their glory: miter shells, bonnet shells, tritons, conches, turreted ceriths, murexes with their long, bladed tails.

In Gilliatt’s head, an idea began to take shape.

Paddling a little closer to the wall, he searched among the shells there until he found what he was looking for, a murex as long as his hand. He grasped it by the spire and tugged the shell away from the rocks. The tail was almost three inches long, a slim spur that came to a point as sharp as a nail. It was a dagger forged by nature. Gilliatt took a firmer grip, and then plunged the long tail into the soft side of the pieuvre.

The monster released him in an instant, expelling a cloud of ink. The luminous water turned black. When the ink had cleared enough for Gilliatt to see the opening to the tunnel once again, he could just make out the burgundy form of the octopus jetting its way out of the cavern.

He was loathe to follow it, but he had no choice. The battle had cost him precious minutes; he could afford no more delay if he was to escape from the subterranean chamber before his muscles seized. Sucking in a gulp of air, he dove once again and followed his assailant to safety.


	2. A Much Maligned Mollusc

What is an octopus? It is a function without a form.

What is its shape? It has no shape. It is rough or smooth, round or flat, short or long, as suits its convenience. It can billow out to a diameter of more than two meters, or squeeze through an opening no larger than a franc. When it wishes to cross a stretch of open seabed it dons the ruffled green of a piece of stray kelp and drifts on the currents, or sinks to the bottom, curls its arms beneath itself, and impersonates a slowly moving rock. In the waters off Indonesia there is an octopus that can adopt the guise of fifteen different species, perfectly imitating their forms and movement: flounders, lionfish, jellyfish, sea snakes.

What is its color? It has no color. In repose, it mirrors the patterns of its backdrop: the yellow and grey speckles of a bed of sand, the striated green of seaweed, the scarlet blotches of coral. As it rises from its hiding place to drop down on its prey, it turns a ghostly white. In anger, it turns black. When it swims, it turns red. To court a lover, it dons the bold patterns of a harlequin. When it dreams, these varied hues bloom and fade across its mantle like the patterns in a kaleidoscope.

It can see only in black and white. Its eyes have only rods. Yet it matches in every detail the colors of its surroundings. How is this perfect camouflage achieved? It is a mystery to science.

The octopus has three hearts, one for its body and a smaller one for each gill. When it swims, the greater heart that pumps blood to the organs cannot beat. A contradiction: to move is to asphyxiate. To breathe freely it must bury itself in a hole.

The octopus is intelligent. It unscrews jars, it escapes from traps, it plays with toys, it uses tools. In the world of animals, intelligence is the preserve of the social. Thought is the child of conscience; we develop memory so we may reward our friends and revenge ourselves upon our enemies. Yet the octopus is solitary. Intelligent animals are long-lived, for there is no benefit to being clever if one does not live long enough to grow wise. Yet the octopus does not live a year.

The rest of the animal kingdom aids in our understanding of ourselves. We watch a chimpanzee caress her infant, and we see the rudiments of emotion. We dissect a frog, and we see how the internal organs are arranged in the body cavity. We dissect a sheep’s eye, and we see the cornea and the optic nerve. The mouse shows us how we resist disease. The zebra fish reveals the development of the embryo. Even the humble fruit fly teaches us how our limbs are arranged along our spine.

The octopus yields us nothing.

In the creation myth of Hawaii, it is said that the octopus is the sole survivor of an earlier world which was destroyed to make our own. When its world perished in fire, it squeezed through the cracks and slipped into ours. It watched as the islands were raised from the ocean and all the other plants and animals were brought to life, an observer rather than a participant in this new creation: separate, isolate, uniquely alien. 

That is an octopus.

It does not exist for our benefit. It does not seek to be comprehensible. It breaks the laws of science without ever being aware of them.

This creature is utterly unlike us, and yet it exists. It renders us unnecessary. If life can follow such a peculiar path, how can we be certain of our own? How can man stand at the center of a universe that also contains an octopus?

In the octopus, we behold our own irrelevance.

It is for this reason that men hate it.


	3. Two Big Bones in One Small Pot

The pieuvre had not returned to the cavern.

It had been stabbed there; the place had unhappy associations. Besides, Clubin had now been dead for almost a month. The crabs had consumed his flesh; the pieuvre had consumed the crabs. Its larder was empty. There is nothing more dismal than the sight of a banqueting table after the feast has been eaten.

While it had been occupied with Clubin, a second, larger pieuvre had taken possession of the shattered bow of the Durande with its wealth of drowned cattle. The undersea cavern was a safe nursery but a cold one; the pieuvre had grown slowly, and had been overtaken by this bolder cousin nourished in the warmer waters of the open sea. With its wounded side, it could not hope to prevail in a fight.

There were, perhaps, crabs enough for both, but octopuses are solitary creatures; the cattle rustler had no inclination to share its bounty. As the injured pieuvre approached the wreck, the lord of the domain hauled itself to the top of the broken keel, raised itself to its full height on its forearms and lifted its mantle. Black flooded across its skin like thunderheads massing before a storm, a stark warning to any who dared trespass among the shattered timbers.

Disgruntled, the wounded pieuvre retreated to the reef.

If it could not gorge itself on the profusion of crabs that had gathered around the drowned cattle, it would have to make do with the meagre fare it could scrape up in the hollows and tide pools of the Douvres. Like Gilliatt, it was reduced to subsisting on limpets and urchins.

Gilliatt did not see it for several days. Men work by day, octopuses by night. In the perpetual twilight of the subterranean cavern the pieuvre had kept its own calendar, untroubled by light or darkness, but now it too was yoked to the sun’s turning wheel. They could encounter each other only at dusk, when Gilliatt ceased his labors and hunted among the rocks for his supper.

One evening he was stalking a crab among the crags and hollows of the lower reef. It was low tide, the best time for hunting. It had been a bright, clear day, and the setting sun had painted the sky with radiant streaks of amber and vermilion. All the air was suffused with a rosy glow; in that warm light, even the grim rocks of the Douvres seemed almost friendly. But it created difficulties for the hunter. Unless he angled himself just right, the reflection of the vivid sky meant he could not see below the surface of the water.

Gilliatt had chased the crab from a shelf of rock into a shallow tide pool. He was near to the place where the rocks of the reef dropped away into the underwater chasm that separated the two sheer walls of granite. Above all he did not want to startle the crab into traversing the little lip of rock that separated the pool from this abyss, where it would be lost to him. He thought that he would only have one chance to seize it. So he was inching very cautiously along the wet rocks that lined the edge of the pool, careful not to betray himself by slipping a foot into the water.

He had just reached a point where he could see clearly beneath the surface without being dazzled by the sunset, and he was readying himself to lunge at the crab, when a bulge of the rough black granite detached itself from the side of the pool. It took on an ashen pallor, billowed open like a sea anchor, and descended on the crab. From the center of this apparition, two yellow eyes glared up at him. Gilliatt recognized the pieuvre.

Having enveloped Gilliatt’s supper, the pieuvre retreated with it to a narrow gap beneath an overhanging boulder. Effortlessly, it squeezed its gelatinous bulk into a opening no wider than his fist, vanishing as if it had been no more than a hallucination. A few moments later, a jet of sand and some broken pieces of crab shell were ejected from the crevice.

Gilliatt was not a man much given to cursing. He stood looking at the dark crack in the rock for a little while in silence, his chin supported by his left hand and his right hand supporting his elbow, and then he turned away and resumed the hunt for his supper.

That night he went to bed hungry.

In the days that followed, Gilliatt saw the pieuvre several times. It was difficult to spot except when it was in motion, for wherever it came to rest it took on the exact color and texture of the rocks around it: rough black with carmine streaks of oxidation, globular purple splotched with green patches of sea mold. But sometimes it would flash white as it pounced upon a crab, or discard its camouflage as it traversed a patch of open water, and in these moments it was visible. He knew it for the monster he had battled in the cavern by the white scar on the webbing just below its siphon, which could be seen against its brick-red body when it swam.

He lost two more crabs to it. The second time, his fingers were only inches from the crab when two arms emerged from the rock and seized it. In frustration, he tried to grab hold of them, but as before his fingers slid off the slimy coating of mucus and he found himself grasping only sand. The pieuvre blew out a jet of water that threw up a cloud of silt. Gilliatt could see nothing in the turbulent water. He groped around blindly after his supper until the octopus began to throw mussel shells at him. He was forced to retreat.

Once a crab leapt out of the water onto the rocks just as a tentacle reached out to ensnare it and scuttled straight into Gilliatt’s waiting hands. He felt a tremendous satisfaction at snatching away this prize.

Most of his adversaries in his great struggle were impossible to wound. He could not avenge himself. How can a man injure the wind, the rain, the sea, the dark? He drove oak wedges and nails into the rocks, but the rocks did not feel them. They were already jagged and full of holes; they would not notice a few more. The reef would be there long after Gilliatt was gone.

He was confronted by the terrible stupid obstinacy of _things_ , which resisted him and tore away at him from every angle, but always with a blind indifference that was more painful than malice. He was besieged by forces so great that they could take no notice of him, an atom assaulted by a globe. Yet their persecutions never faltered. They could not perceive him, but they were bent on crushing him. At best he could defend himself and his projects against them. At worst he must bow his head and suffer their blows in silence.

To have an enemy that he could know, and see, and thwart, an enemy that could suffer the same gnawing hunger that he did: this was a great comfort to him.


	4. Perseus Allied with Medusa

Gradually, so slowly that he was not aware of it himself, Gilliatt’s feelings towards his gelatinous adversary had begun to change. At first he scanned the pools and cavities of the reef for the pieuvre because he dared not venture into deeper water when it was near for fear that it would seize him again and drag him under, and because he was ever alert to the possibility that it might steal his supper. He hoped to spot it in order to be certain of where it was, so that he might have the assurance of knowing where it was not.

But as the days wore on and he was not attacked, the creeping unease he felt whenever he failed to find the pieuvre yielded to a quiet disappointment. It was a disappointment he experienced less and less often. Either he had become much better at spotting the creature as he grew familiar with its favorite haunts and guises, or it had grown more regular in its habits. He began to feel that it was waiting for him when he finished his day’s work, like a loyal dog that greets its master at the door.

Gilliatt had formed a friendship with the birds. But the birds were transitory, fungible. They descended from the sky and went back into it, they were chips broken off the Infinite, wisps of cloud and flecks of foam brought to raucous, squabbling life, whitecaps in the form of an animal. They came from vastness and returned to vastness. They were a collective, _birds_ ; they were not individual. Gilliatt did not know from one night to the next whether his companions in his lofty roost were the same as the night before, or strangers.

Besides, there was a sense in which they were allied with the enemy. They were Gilliatt’s comrades, because they were alive, but they came and went freely from his prison. The sea and sky, which weighed on him with such relentless animosity, were their element. The barren rocks of the reef, so hostile to terrestrial life, were their haven. Gilliatt loved them, because in his stark redoubt there was so little else to love. But he could not fully trust them.

There was only one pieuvre, and it too was bound to the reef.

He conceived that the octopus was female. Why? There was a daintiness in the way it picked its way across the reef, seldom jetting upward to swim in the open water, but instead dancing from rock to rock along the bottom on its many arms. The arching bell of its web, with its ever-changing calico patterns, brought to mind the dresses of a lady of fashion. But most of all, because it was _la pieuvre_. Words shape our reality. We say of a bridge that it is _towering, sturdy_. In German they say it is _elegant, fragile,_ because _eine Brücke_ is feminine. When the pieuvre ceased to be a monster, it became a woman.

He noticed that in the vicinity of the pieuvre, there were more crabs and chitons to be found up on the rocks. They wished to avoid being caught by her in deep water even more than Gilliatt did, and with good reason. Likewise, in the vicinity of Gilliatt, there were more crabs to be found in the water. Perhaps this was the reason that the pieuvre had begun to appear in the pools below his storeroom around dusk.

Gilliatt’s understanding of the situation inverted. It was as though he had been looking at the world through a camera, and he had suddenly popped his head out of the hood. She had not stolen his suppers; he had been helping her to catch hers. On the day when the crab had leapt out of the water and into his hands, she had flushed it for him like a spaniel. They were not rivals; they were partners.

Now that he saw the truth, he could turn it to his benefit. No longer did he seek her out in order to avoid her. Instead he located her and then slowly approached her across the rocks, alert to any small scuttling movements at his feet. Gilliatt herded the crabs towards the pieuvre, and the pieuvre frightened them back out of the water and up towards Gilliatt. In this way, they both increased their catch.

In the Amazon, there are fisherman who fish together with the wild river dolphins. The dolphins drive the fish into their nets, and then pick out their own supper from the wriggling mass. Gilliatt had achieved such a partnership, but with a mollusc.

In this collaboration to fill their bellies lay the beginnings of a domestication. Or a marriage.

One evening towards the end of his labors on the reef, when the miserable rain of the past few weeks had abated and they had both dined well on crab, Gilliatt lingered below instead of immediately ascending the rope ladder to his wretched garret atop the Great Douvre. It was a mild night, the moon was in its third quarter, and by its cold, clear light the pieuvre was amusing herself in the channel at the base of the rocks.

Gilliatt sat at the edge of the pool and watched her for a time as she glided over stones and idly probed the crevices and cracks with her tentacles. The ever-changing pattern on her mantle seemed almost comprehensible, as if it carried a message he would be able to read if he watched her for a little while longer. There was something hypnotic about the scene: the warm night, the moonlight, the silent, majestic progress of the pieuvre beneath the waves.

Almost in a trace, Gilliatt trailed his fingers in the water. The pieuvre paused in her explorations and looked up at him; perhaps she felt the vibration. Then she jetted upwards. She came to rest a foot below the surface, clinging to the rocks with her suckers. Tentatively, she lifted a single arm towards him. The very tip of the tentacle unfurled and reached out to touch his fingers. Her suckers adhered to them, not with the agonizing force he had felt in the cave, but with a gentle suction like a lover’s kiss.


	5. Weighing Anchor

In the days that followed their moonlit encounter Gilliatt saw less of the pieuvre. His struggle against sea and sky and stone was nearing its conclusion. As his physical condition deteriorated and the moment to lower the engines drew nearer, he had less time and strength to spend on twilight hunting expeditions. To complete his task, that was the sole thought that animated him now. He had climbed to a mental plane that transcended crabmeat.

He liberated the engines, he tamed the storm. Afterwards, for the first time in several days, he became aware of the pangs of hunger gnawing at his belly. He felt that after his triumph over the elements, he deserved to dine on something better than limpets. He wanted a crab. It was mid-afternoon; his hunting partner was still sleeping. Gilliatt was left to his own devices.

He wandered along the outside of the reef and chased a crab into the passageway to the flooded cavern where he had first fought the pieuvre, which had been exposed by the low tide. He reached his hand into a crack in the granite and groped around in the darkness. Suddenly he felt something seize his grasping fingers. It was the crab. It was a large crab and it pinched terribly. He yanked his hand out of the crevice, pulling with it the crab, which released its grip on his fingers and was flung against the opposite wall of the tunnel by the force of his motion. The crab went scuttling back up the passage out to the reef, with Gilliatt in pursuit.

Preoccupied with these struggles, he did not chance to look up into the vaulting chambers on either side of the cavern’s entrance.

He returned from an unsuccessful hunt to find the sloop filled with almost two feet of water. Of all the calamities that had dogged his enterprise, this one came nearest to defeating him, but this crisis too was overcome. He plugged the leak, he bailed out the boat, he repaired the damage. At dawn the next morning he was ready to set sail.

The small anchor from the Durande had been invaluable in the storm, but now it presented a difficulty. The sloop had not been designed to have a third anchor at the stern. In all Gilliatt’s repairs and modifications to the vessel back in Guernsey, he had not anticipated this possibility. There was no cathead to prevent the anchor from striking the wooden hull as he hauled it up. He could have built one when he found the anchor, but he had not wanted to waste his scarce timber supply on anything that was not an absolute necessity.

It now seemed like a necessity. Having nearly lost his venture and his life on account of one hole in his boat, he did not want to risk another.

He could have cut the cable loose and abandoned it, but the anchor was a sound piece of ironwork and he wanted to retrieve as much of the the wrecked Durande as he could. He hated to lose it. So instead he hauled the cable most of the way up and let the anchor trail a foot below the hull. The sloop was heavily laden and it was not a sleek vessel even when light: the extra drag would not impede its progress.

This measure was a success. Gilliatt navigated out of the reef without catching the trailing anchor on the rocks, and gave no more thought to it until late that afternoon, when he was more than halfway to Guernsey. The sails were set and in no immediate need of his attention, so he had gone to the stern to inspect his cargo. All was as it should be: the slings holding the crates that contained the paddle wheels were intact, the funnel was still firmly chained to the four rings in the sides of the sloop, the engines were resting safely in the hull. His eye chanced to catch on the anchor trailing behind the boat.

It seemed somehow misshapen, as if it had acquired a deformity. He thought a piece of seaweed must be fouling it, and leaned over the stern to get a closer look. The seaweed looked back at him.

In his panic over the leak, he had forgotten about the pieuvre. He had been too exhausted and relieved during his final evening on the reef to go chasing after crabs; he had not thought to seek out his hunting companion. Some sea urchins had been washed up into the pools around the two Douvres by the storm. Gilliatt ate a few of these and went to sleep in the sloop. This morning he had left at dawn, without even stopping for breakfast.

He had forgotten to say farewell to her. He thought of this after he was several miles from the reef, and regretted it. She would not have understood, of course, but he would have liked to see her one last time. He was not at all sorry to leave the Douvres, but he was sorry to leave her.

In the course of these reflections he had not thought about her habit of lingering in the pools around the Douvres, where the sloop had been waiting to set sail. It had not occurred to him she might anchor herself to his anchor.

“That was very foolish of you,” he scolded her. “You know you cannot live out in the open sea, so now you must come along with me to Guernsey.”

The pieuvre gazed at him with her strange hourglass eyes and made no reply.

Despite his words, Gilliatt’s heart lifted. He was not sorry that she had accompanied him. He had the Durande’s engines, he had his pieuvre, and he was coming home to Déruchette. He had overcome all the obstacles. Surely fate could have no more blows in store for him.

Before Gilliatt brought the sloop into the harbor of St. Sampson, he stopped just offshore of his private anchorage beside the Bû de la Rue and dropped the third anchor, lowering it very slowly and carefully to the seabed so that it would not slam against the rocks. Ten minutes later he pulled the anchor up again.

It was empty.

He did not think the pieuvre would be happy in the harbor of St. Sampson, which was crowded with ships and people and short on crabs. He had terrible visions of fishing nets. But no one ever sailed up the Houmet Paradis or braved the waters so near to the Horn of the Beast except for him. His isolation would be her protection.

Now that his passenger had disembarked, it was time to discharge his cargo. He brought the sloop into the harbor and moored it outside Les Bravées. Then he went to his old spot behind the garden wall.

The universe reserves certain punishments for eavesdroppers.

Gilliatt went to Mess Lethierry and declined Déruchette’s hand. He arranged her wedding. Her uncle did not know about it, but he was certain to accept it. Ebenezer Caudray’s new fortune could finance his new boat.

Déruchette was happy.

Gilliatt was plunged into an icy abyss, as he had once been in the hidden cavern of the pieuvre.

He went to the Seat of Gild-Holm-‘Ur to reconcile his location with his mood.


	6. As Long As There Are Two, Life Is Possible

Sometimes it is difficult to drown.

Gilliatt awoke to a trickle of water running past his face. This water was brackish. Beneath him was sand, still warm from the sun. Above him were the first stars of evening. There was a weight on his legs. In the air, there was the trill of birdsong and the constant murmur of waves beating against a rocky shoreline.

This crashing of waves is a fingerprint. Every headland and inlet has its own unique heartbeat; the discerning ear can pick them out, as seabirds can distinguish their own chick’s cry in a rookery of thousands. The sound of the water surging against these rocks was familiar to Gilliatt. He had been listening to it all his life. He was lying at the mouth of the creek of Houmet Paradis, on the flat expanse of sand where it fanned out and flowed into the bay.

He experienced this awakening with more bemusement than dismay. He had seated himself on the Seat of Gild-Holm-‘Ur not so much because he wanted to die, but because he could not imagine how to live. In his youth he had suffered one loss, the loss of his mother, which he had weathered with numb despair. He had survived it almost by accident. He had retreated into his isolation like a snail into its shell; he had abandoned the world of people, and the world of nature had embraced him.

This second loss, the loss of Déruchette, seemed insurmountable. For four years, she had been the fulcrum on which all his thoughts had turned. Even when he had been absorbed by his labors on the Douvres, he had felt her pulling on him as the poles draw the compass needle, a slight constant pressure guiding him onwards. His mother had merely been his companion; Déruchette had been his beacon. The loss of a person is less devastating than the loss of an ideal.

Gilliatt could not remember how he had filled his days before he spent them hiding behind her garden wall. What had he thought about? What concerns had occupied him? What had he wanted? Having lost the thing he wanted most in the world, he could no longer imagine wanting anything. To live without desires is terrible. It would be simpler not to live at all.

It was in this frame of mind that he had climbed the Horn of the Beast and allowed the tide to overtake him.

He became aware that the weight on his legs had shifted. He looked down, scraping his cheek on the grit of the streambed, and beheld the pieuvre.

There were sores on the back of his neck, his right arm, his ankle. He looked at his arm where it lay flung out across the sand. His sleeve was rucked up, and there were dark, round bruises marching up to his elbow in neat parallel lines.

She must have dragged his unconscious body from the Seat of Gild-Holm-‘Ur up onto the beach. A feat as impressive in its way as Gilliatt’s rescue of the Durande’s engines: even in his emaciated condition, he must have been four times her weight. But she had the awesome force of her suction to help her, and the motion of the surf. The waves would have helped to carry him to shore.

Unquestionably, she had done it. But why had she done it? Could it be that this creature of the ocean, this being who employed gills, who could breathe through her skin, who would suffocate if she spent too long on dry land, understood that Gilliatt needed air to breathe? That it would be fatal for him to remain underwater, and she must bring him to shore if she wanted him to live? Could it be that she had ventured onto this foreign, hostile territory for his sake? That, in her own strange cold-blooded way, she cared for his life?

She knew how to drown a man. Did she know how to save one?

It was not impossible.

She was draped over his calves, darkly glistening in the dim light. Gilliatt thought perhaps he should be angry with her for spoiling his plans, but could not bring himself to fault her. She had meant well. She was a loyal friend.

He was not sure what to do about his unexpected survival – the day’s emotions had sapped him of his usual decisiveness – but whatever he chose, he could not do it lying prone on a streambed. He got an arm beneath him and laboriously levered himself over onto his back. No bones seemed to be broken, but every one of his muscles ached, and bruises left by the pieuvre’s suckers throbbed painfully.

He had expected this motion to drive her off, back into the water. She had a fear of him since he stabbed her in the cavern; except for that one night in the moonlight, she had never touched him. His movements made her skittish.

Instead she mounded up above him, crawling up his body to his waist, rising up on her arms and lifting her mantle. It was a strange behavior, one that he could not recall seeing before – except, Gilliatt realized with a jolt of alarm, immediately before she pounced on a crab.

Perhaps it had not been a rescue after all. Perhaps she had brought him here to consume him, away from the Horn of the Beast where she would be battered by the surf.

This idea, which during their combat in the cavern had filled him with unspeakable horror, now pleased him. It was much better than being rescued. “I will be of use to her,” he told himself. His affairs were in order. He had disposed of his most valuable possessions among the two beings he cared for most in the world. The trunk containing his bride’s trousseau had gone to clothe Déruchette; his body, which was no good to Déruchette, would go to feed the pieuvre. He could not think of anything better, except perhaps to have drowned first.

If this was the pieuvre’s plan, she was in no hurry to implement it. We have mentioned before that she was a gourmet, who preferred to dine only on crab.

Instead, she explored him with her tentacles, all eight at once, the tips brushing delicately over his skin, pausing every so often to apply a gentle suction. Hauling him to shore seemed to have banished all her fear of him. An arm caressed his face. Another slipped beneath his collar and prodded at his chest. A third crawled into his pocket, which still held the key to his house. A fourth slid beneath the waistband of his trousers and coiled around his sex.

Gilliatt endured this examination passively. He was still a little worried that if he moved too abruptly he might frighten her off, in which case she might not eat him. More than that, he found he did not mind it. There was something dreamlike about it: the warm spring air, the evening chorus of birds, the thin trickle of water flowing through the sand beneath him, the strange creature touching every inch of his body. On the Douvres, he had felt that the unseen confluence of natural forces bore an innate hostility towards life. Lying on his back in the creek of Houmet Paradis, he felt the opposite.

There is a moist fecundity to May, a force in the air that says “Live! Be happy! Create more life!” Gilliatt had been the agent of this force, perhaps, when he arranged Déruchette’s marriage. He felt it working in him now as the pieuvre gently palpated his member, tasting it with her suckers. It did not seem like anything very bad could happen to him while he lay there in the starlight. Perhaps being devoured by an octopus would not be as painful as he thought.

Or perhaps the death she had in mind for him was of a different sort.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> • The title for Chapter 2 is derived from _Un Mollusque bien Maltraité, ou comment M. Victor Hugo comprend l'organization du Poulpe_ , a pamphlet that was published by the outraged French conchologist Hippolyte Crosse in response to Hugo's various slanders against the noble pieuvre.
> 
> The title for Chapter 3 comes from the Guernsey proverb "Daeux gros os n’peuve bouidre dans lé mesme pot," said of rivals.
> 
> • While it's true that octopuses have no cone cells and therefore cannot differentiate between varying wavelengths of light in the way that most animals do, their color vision is not a _total_ mystery to science. Scientists do have a theory: their oddly shaped pupils are designed to maximize [chromatic aberration](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromatic_aberration), the optical property which causes objects to have blurred fringes of color in badly focused photographs. By using the lenses of their eyes to split light into its component wavelengths and then changing the depth of their eyeball to bring specific wavelengths to focus on the retina, they can tell what color things are even with only one type of photoreceptor. This is an incredibly computationally inefficient method for seeing in color, which may account for their high intelligence: they need a large brain in order to perform all these calculations.
> 
> Either way, though, they're a pretty effective argument against teleological views of evolution.
> 
> • This version of the Hawaiian creation story, on the other hand, is complete bollocks, based on a mistranslation of the _Kumulipo_ by a nineteenth century German anthropologist more familiar with cultures that believe in multiple creation cycles, who didn’t realize that isn’t a thing in Polynesia.
> 
> But a) it's cool, and b) what would a Hugo pastiche be without some absolute nonsense asserted confidently by the author as fact?


End file.
